Lithuania

V

Government

Lithuania is a democratic republic. According to its constitution, which was ratified in late 1992, the president is the head of state. The Lithuanian president is elected by direct popular vote for a term of five years and may serve a maximum of two consecutive terms. The president formally appoints a prime minister, the head of government, who must be approved by parliament. Members of the council of ministers are nominated by the prime minister. For administrative purposes, the country is divided into ten counties.

The highest legislative authority in Lithuania is the Seimas, or parliament, a single-chamber body composed of 141 members elected to four-year terms. Seventy-one seats in the Seimas are determined by direct popular vote in single-member districts, while the remaining seats are allocated on a proportional basis to each party that receives at least 5 percent of the vote. All citizens age 18 and older may vote.

Lithuania’s judicial system, which is based on a civil law system, consists of the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court, the Court of Appeal, and district and local courts. The Supreme Court is the highest court. Its judges are appointed by the Seimas on the recommendation of the president. The Seimas also appoints the members of the Constitutional Court, which rules on the constitutionality of legislation. The president appoints all other judges, with appointments to the Court of Appeal subject to approval by the Seimas.

During the Soviet period, Lithuania had no armed forces separate from those of the Soviet Union. Lithuania’s defense forces now include an army of 11,600, a paramilitary border guard, and a volunteer home guard reserve. The country also has a small navy (710 members) and air force (1,200 members). Men are conscripted for 12 months beginning at age 18.

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Lithuania is a member of the United Nations (UN) and the Council of Europe. The country became a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 2004. Lithuania’s relations with its Baltic neighbors, Latvia and Estonia, are loosely coordinated through the Baltic Assembly, a consultative intergovernmental body. Like the other Baltic states, Lithuania has declined membership in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a loose alliance of most of the former Soviet republics.

VI

History

The ancestors of Lithuanians came to the Baltic area most likely around 2500 bc. The first reference to them by name was in ad 1009 in a medieval German manuscript, the Quedlinburg Chronicle. With the rise of the medieval lords in Germany and Russia, Lithuania was constantly subject to invasion and attempted conquest. In the 13th century, when the Teutonic Knights, a German militaristic religious order, were establishing their power, the Lithuanians resisted. The various Lithuanian tribes united to form a loose federation under pagan chieftain Mindaugas. Mindaugas was baptized as a Christian in 1251 and subsequently crowned king of Lithuania under the authority of Pope Innocent IV. In about 1260 the Lithuanians defeated the Knights’ attempt to capture Lithuanian territory. In 1263 Mindaugas was assassinated, probably by pagan Lithuanian princes, and Lithuania officially reverted to paganism.

In the 1300s Mindaugas’s successors began to expand their realm by incorporating, through conquest, Slavic lands to the east and south. Under Lithuanian ruler Gediminas, the empire was expanded in the south to include most of present-day Belarus, and Vilnius was established as the capital. Lithuanian grand duke Algirdas then expanded the Lithuanian realm east toward Moscow and south to the Black Sea. In 1386 Grand Duke Jogaila joined Lithuania in a dynastic union with Poland when he married Polish queen Jadwiga. Jogaila accepted Christianity, becoming a Roman Catholic, and was crowned Władysław II (Jagiełło), king of Poland.

A

Union with Poland

King Jagiełło and his cousin Vytautas, who became grand duke of Lithuania in 1392, led joint armed forces to decisively defeat the Teutonic Knights in 1410. Vytautas died without an heir in 1430. Beginning in 1447 the king of Poland also ruled Lithuania. In 1558 Russian tsar Ivan IV (the Terrible) invaded the northern Baltic region, thereby instigating the Livonian War. With Russian expansionism posing an increasing threat, Lithuania sought stronger ties with Poland. In 1569, by the terms of the Union of Lublin, the two states formed a political union with a common legislature and a jointly elected sovereign.

The new confederated state was officially known as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Rzeczpospolita). Although Lithuanian autonomy was guaranteed within the union, Poland assumed a dominant role. The Lithuanian gentry adopted Polish customs and language, while the Lithuanian peasantry was forced into serfdom and converted to Christianity.

In the last years of the Livonian War, which ended with Russia’s defeat in 1583, the commonwealth gained Livonia and other territory. In 1629, however, the commonwealth was forced to cede most of Livonia to Sweden.

B

Russian Rule

Conflict with Russia resumed in the early 1600s, culminating in Russia’s devastating invasion of the commonwealth in 1654. The commonwealth began to deteriorate as a political power, and in the late 1700s the Austrian, Russian, and Prussian empires conspired to partition its territory. Poland was divided among the three empires. Lithuania was annexed by Russia, except for a small section in the southwest that was awarded to Prussia; that too went to Russia in 1815.

Under Russian rule, Lithuanians became a completely subject people. Lithuanians joined with Poles in large-scale rebellions against Russian rule in 1812, from 1830 to 1831, and in 1863, but all were harshly suppressed and resulted in increased repression of Lithuanian culture. After the 1831 revolt, the University of Vilnius was closed and the imperial government mandated that Russian be the only language taught in Lithuanian schools. From 1865 to 1904 Lithuanian could only legally be printed in the Russian Cyrillic alphabet, although books printed in Latin-script Lithuanian were smuggled in from Germany.

During the Russian Revolution of 1905 (a widespread revolt for political reform), a congress of elected Lithuanian representatives demanded that the Russian government allow for Lithuanian self-government, but the demand was rejected. The revolution brought about some minor concessions, however, and restrictions on the Lithuanian language were lifted. During the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Russian Empire collapsed and militant socialists called Bolsheviks seized control of the Russian government.

C

Creation of Modern Lithuania

During World War I (1914-1918), the German army occupied Lithuania. In February 1918 Lithuanian nationalists declared Lithuania’s independence. When the war ended in November and German forces withdrew, the Lithuanian Taryba (Council) established a provisional government. The new government barely had a foothold, however, when Bolshevik forces invaded Vilnius and installed a pro-Bolshevik regime in the city. The provisional government fled to Kaunas and organized the Lithuanian National Army. The army eventually drove Bolshevik forces out of Lithuania, but in 1920 Polish forces occupied Vilnius and established a puppet government there. The Polish parliament subsequently annexed the Vilnius area.

In Kaunas, meanwhile, a Lithuanian constituent assembly was elected in April 1920, and in 1922 it approved a new constitution that officially established Lithuania as an independent republic. The new constitution, which replaced the temporary constitution of 1920, provided for a democratic system of government, including a president as head of state and a unicameral (single-chamber) parliament, or Seimas. Later in 1922, the Bolsheviks founded the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Two countries that today border Lithuania, Russia and Belorussia (now Belarus), were among the USSR’s constituent republics.

In 1922 the Lithuanian Seimas implemented a program of land reform. Land from large estates was expropriated and redistributed among Lithuania’s peasantry. Although the land reform was initially successful, in the 1930s many peasants abandoned their farms to seek employment in the cities. In the Seimas, meanwhile, conservative and liberal factions could not reconcile their differences. On December 17, 1926, Lithuanian nationalists led by conservative statesman Antanas Smetona, working with the support of the Lithuanian army, engineered a coup d’état. All liberals and leftists were expelled from the Seimas, which then elected Smetona as president. In 1928 a new constitution was passed that formalized the new government structure in which Smetona ruled by decree.

After Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in the 1930s, Nazi Party propaganda agitated Germans to rise up against Lithuania over the territory of Memel (now Klaipėda), located on the Baltic coast. Largely Lithuanian-inhabited Memel was part of Germany before World War I, but the Allied Powers put it under Lithuanian administration, and in 1923 Lithuania annexed it to gain a seaport. In March 1939 Hitler reannexed the territory.

On September 1, 1939, Germany attacked Poland (an act that marked the outbreak of World War II) after signing a nonaggression pact with the USSR. The pact contained a secret protocol that assigned Lithuania to the German sphere of influence; however, later that month the pact was amended to add most of Lithuania to the territories assigned to the USSR. This in effect sanctioned the USSR to annex Lithuania. In October the Soviet government forced Lithuania to agree to a mutual-assistance treaty by which Lithuania was compelled to admit 20,000 Soviet troops into its territory. The USSR in turn granted Lithuania its historic capital of Vilnius, which Soviet troops had released from Polish occupation.

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